Laughter really is the best medicine

The next time you go to see your doctor about your heart, instead of giving you yet another prescription for some problematic medication that likely has more potential complications than Lindsay Lohan’s life story, your doctor should just sit you down and smile and start telling you a story that begins with,  “So, Joe, a rabbi, a priest, and an Imam walk into a bar,” because getting you to laugh may actually do you way more good than the medications you will likely get, especially if you have heart disease.

At least that’s the conclusion I reached after reading about a tiny study of 20 people with Type 2 diabetes which was presented at the laugh-a-minute 122^nd Annual Meeting of the American Physiological Society.

In this study, all the diabetics were receiving the appropriate drugs for their condition: diabetes drugs, drugs to lower blood pressure, and drugs to control cholesterol, but one group of 10 was also told to start treating themselves to regular 30-minute bouts of self-selected humour.

In other words, they were told to “just laugh more, dudes”.

And the results are no joke: at the end of one year, the laughter group not only had much better levels of inflammatory proteins than the other group, the yukkers also had levels of HDL– the good cholesterol– that had risen by 26 % versus a very small rise in the no-laughter group, and that’s no laughing matter, folks, because that 24 % rise in HDL is way better than any rise you could get from drugs.

So, hey, if you want to lower your risk of heart disease, instead of taking a higher dose of a statin drug or way more high blood pressure meds, why not just rent the video of the Ricky Gervais version of the Office or some old Fawlty Towers videos instead?